


idek yet

by TimesBeingWhatTheyAre



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:02:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23684344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TimesBeingWhatTheyAre/pseuds/TimesBeingWhatTheyAre
Summary: jkdjk
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

Damien hefted the hammer high over his head, and brought it down with a solid thump of sound.

Besides him, a quiet gasp of awe sounded. He rolled his eyes in exasperation, and turned to the source of the noise.

“Henry.” He stated, and the young boy shrunk back from him, brown eyes wide and lip trembling in mock innocence.

“Yes s-sir?” Henry gulped audibly, and Damien sighed.

“Why are you not with your father?” Damien asked harshly, raising a bushy eyebrow at the boy with a glance snuck in between lining up the metal in front of him for the next shot.

“He said I could- come here?” Henry explained, or lied as the case may be, and Damien growled in response.

“The truth,” he snapped, punctuating his point with another thwack of the hammer against the solid weight of the anvil. The iron flared darker with the hit, the end beginning to flatten into something relatively like a horseshoe, but the item was far from done.

Still, it needed heating, and so he used the tongs beside him to guide the metal back into the fire. He took advantage of the momentary break to turn back to the nuisance that had invaded his space.

“Henry. Go back to your father. Help him,” ‘not me’ he added in the safety of his mind, the words hanging heavily implied in the moggy air.

“But- your work is so exciting, sir!” Henry exclaimed, and Damien glanced up at him from the fire.

The iron was almost hot enough again.

“Go,” Damien ordered, turning away once more to lift the half-finished shoe back onto the anvil. He heard the scrambling of small feet behind him, but didn’t bother to watch the boy go. Odds were for his return within a week or so anyway.

“You know, you’re quite hard on that boy,” a female voice commented from the other side of the smithery, by the doors to the shop.

He grunted in response, picking up his hammer once more and battering at the molten orange metal again, moving faster without a boy to get under his feet.

“Baby, I’ve got dinner prepared for us,” she said, and he heard the rustling of her dress as she moved closer. She wrapped her arms tightly around him, but he didn’t reply, too busy moulding the dark metal into the shape he wanted. Her body felt warm and a little uncomfortable against him, and Damien was rather concerned that he would accidentally catch her arm underneath the powerful blows of the hammer.

“Step back,” he said curtly, and he felt her warm breath sigh against his back, before Marienne stepped back and away from him.

He glanced down at the horseshoe in his hand. In all honesty, whilst he would prefer to finish it then, the shoe wasn’t wanted for another few days. It was paid for by the cloth merchant Firen, and he wasn’t due back in town until the end of the week. He had time to finish it in the morning.

“Fine,” he capitulated, and placed down the hammer on the worktop. He turned to face his fiancé, and fought the urge to roll his eyes at the gratefulness in her expressive brown eyes. “2 minutes,” he stated, and she skipped back to the door with a grin.

He relaxed when she left, putting the deformed horseshoe on the metal top to cool down slowly, and using the poker to spread apart the wood in the furnace. It continued burning, but the heat was quickly fading, and Damien grabbed the water bucket to put out the actual flames before he left, not wanting to burn down their house.

He walked over to the open side of his shop, grabbing the shutters and pulling them closed, and securing them with a large bolt. He did the same for the shop door, leaving the workspace plunged into darkness, just as he was used to, then Damien walked back into the clinging warmth of their house.

Inside, it was brightly lit and the fireplace had another fire burning steadily.

Marianne was sat expectantly at the table, and he sighed once more, closing the smithery door quietly behind him as he tried to force his eyes to adjust.

“It’s warm!” she beamed up at him brightly, delicate features and wispy blonde hair making her appear younger than her 20-odd years. Damien made an effort to smile back, and nearly succeeded.

“Thanks,” he responded instead, taking his seat opposite her, and digging into the slightly burnt pie that she had placed in front of him. It was good food, although not brilliant, and he knew that he should be grateful for her efforts.

She began chattering at him as he ate, telling him stories of her day and some of the gossip that the other woman had shared with her during their washing earlier, and he nodded on occasion and pretended interest. They both knew he didn’t really care, but it made his life easier if he didn’t say anything.

She climbed into the rickety bed lightly, still making the frame rock a little unsteadily, and as Damien lay still on his back, she bent over him and kissed him firmly, delicate hands clasping his cheeks as though daring him to move.

He moved.

He rolled onto the other side, hearing her heavy breathing in the familiar darkness, and although he could not see her frown, he could feel it.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he offered conciliatorily, and she kissed his shoulder lightly.

“Tomorrow,” she repeated, and Damien was glad, as usual, that she couldn’t see his face in the dark.

It was, after all, the same thing they always said.

________________________________________

The next day dawned quietly, and Damien woke up with the sun, dressing and waking Marienne before he left. She had responsibilities to Yttril, the healer she was apprenticed to, and he had a few deliveries to make.

She smiled at him invitingly as he stepped out the door, but he didn’t bother looking back. He was, after all, working.

He opened the forge efficiently, drawing back the bolts on the doors and window to allow some of the fresh air in, and to make sure that nobody was dropping by for early morning orders. Sometimes there were people, although more regularly he gained business from the tradesmen who came along in the late morning and early afternoon.

That wasn’t the case for him that day, so Damien found his large leather satchel, and placed in it a couple of the items that were lying around his counters. Most of the time he expected people to come back to collect their own merchandise, but he visited a few people around town who paid the extra or struggled to make it to his door.

He glanced a little ruefully at the half-finished axel for a plow that sat in the corner of the workspace. It was for Leon, the farmer on the other side of town, and the man was getting on in years, so he often brought around any of the equipment that was asked of him. However, the plow (once finished) was going to be too large for any sort of delivery without a cart, so the man was going to have to collect it himself.

In the meantime, he trod a quick pace around the little village, delivering a few tools, pots and a cauldron to the old lady down by the river. Damien stopped briefly by the market, buying a couple of apples off one of the stalls, but he wanted to hurry back to the forge to make sure he replenished his stock of nails before any more of the carpenters decided they needed some in a hurry. They were making a roaring trade with the ever-increasing stream of visitors to Temes, the citadel, and some of them were becoming exponentially arrogant to match.

Sometimes, people called out to him in a friendly hello. He acknowledged such people with a nod and the occasional flash of a smile, but on the whole people tended to steer clear of him.

It made life a whole lot easier.

Still, even without too much disturbance to his morning routine, Damien was always glad to make it back to his forge. The heat and the darkness of the place often put off people for staying long, and he was rather happy about it.

Marienne was long gone, her skirts whirled up in her hurry to get to her master as soon as possible. He sometimes thought, perhaps a little uncharitably, that she would prefer to be marrying him instead. Such thoughts were, however, few and far between (if only because he recognised the truth in them and preferred not to linger on such things).

He unlocked his doors jerkily, throwing them open a little roughly, and remembering why he hadn’t ever thought of taking up delicate trades like glasswork.

It was the work of minutes to set up his bellows to the right position, light the fire and begin pumping it back up to its full capacity. It was hard work but lacking any sort of mental energy, and so he was free to count over the jobs he had set himself for the day. A small part of him was wondering whether he ought to do something for Marienne, to sooth her obviously straining patience with his reticence, but the bigger part of him couldn’t really care less whether she was annoyed with him or not.

He put aside his confusion over whatever was happening with Marienne, and decided instead that he should just get on with the day and complete some orders before angry customers started knocking on his doors.

Damien sometimes wondered how it was that he had ended up as a blacksmith. He had vague memories of his time as an apprentice, but it was hard to remember his early life, other than the fact that he had grown up in a town on the border between Exura and Keariris, and that it had just been him and his mother growing up. He thought some days that she had been the one to push him into metalwork, but other days he realised that maybe it was just that he suited the job well.

Metal didn’t require small talk or subtleties- it was just inanimate hunks that bent to his will, and that was how he liked it. The orange glow of the heat sparked with every blow of the hammer on the anvil, sometimes leaping onto his thick apron and flickering back into nothingness, and all the while his pile of horseshoes, nails, forks and spoons grew larger. There was even a small dagger resting on top of the pile for the day.

The dagger wasn’t a custom order, although it was rare for him to have any made, but Damien rather enjoyed creating sharp edges and intricate decorations, both of which were desired in a dagger. He indulged in it on the odd week, and every so often (if the dagger was pretty enough) it would pay off in a purchase.

He was no castle blacksmith though. He was sure his daggers and swords wouldn’t withstand half the force a proper sword should, but nobody a week’s ride out of Temes needed anything like that, so it had never really been an issue.

He glanced down at his wares briefly, cataloguing what he had already on the shelves, and seeing what he had to do still, and paused to pump the bellows for a couple of minutes. Metal was an easy routine, and Damien fell into it just as easily, and so perhaps it made sense that it was nearing the end of the day before Damien noticed that something was wrong.

There had been the usual bustle of customers earlier on, fading to a trickle that had kept him occupied long enough that he hadn’t noticed it before but-

There was no noise outside.

Cirrane wasn’t the busiest village in the world, but on a regular day, late afternoon would be the beginning of everyone returning to their families, and the kids could often be seen roaming the streets and yelling nonsense at the top of their lungs, as kids do best. But for some reason, that wasn’t the case.

Damien thought logically that it was likely nothing, but the quiet was unsettling, and so he put down the metal and pliers that he was holding, took his foot off of the bellows and lifted the heavy apron over his head, laying it down next to the metal. He left the fire burning, knowing that there wasn’t anything near enough to catch alight in the five minutes it would take him to check out the village, and strode outside into the fading sunlight.

He looked around cautiously, realising that he was the only person standing in the cobbled street, and decided to head towards the village square to see if anyone was there instead. The market would be closed, but the tavern should be open and thriving.

He set off determinedly, and in the distance, he began to hear people again. Damien relaxed a little, knowing that whatever was happening couldn’t be too peculiar or dangerous, but as the noises grew louder, he realised that it wasn’t the usual bartering and bantering, but quiet chatter and the occasional clip of hooves.

Bandits, maybe, he wondered, and quickened his pace. He didn’t have any weapons on him, but it would be better to fight with the others than stand alone to protect his life and his forge.

He entered the main square with his customary frown, to find a scene of mild chaos. The other villagers were standing around in small clusters, intermingled with those who appeared to be knights

Around the edge of the square, more knights sat on horses, the sunlight shining brightly off of their polished armour. It was well-made, Damien noted in appreciation, with smooth joins and no signs of rust even on the small links of the chainmail, and the shields that rested on top of the saddlebags were painted a deep blue in the coat of King Tovi.

Knights of the king.

He glanced quickly behind him, noting that his arrival had not gone unnoticed by the nearest knight, who had turned his head a little to watch him. Briefly, Damien noted that they didn’t seem to expect any arrivals, and in fact the small clusters of villagers looked as though they had been rounded up from wherever they were in the village. The darkness of the forge had perhaps led them to mistakenly think his shop was empty, or maybe they simply hadn’t bothered with a thorough search in such a clearly harmless town.

Damien looked back towards the crowd of people, whom he was a little separated from by the mouth of the alley he had entered by, and he walked over to join the edges of the group. A couple of them stopped to notice his arrival, but even the nervous chatter was dying down as one of the knights rode to the centre of the opposite side of the square.

He carried a scroll in his bag, but the man didn’t pull it out to read it. He knew his missive.

Instead, Damien watched as he surveyed the population calmly through his helmet slit, and called out to them in an authoritative tone.

“By order of King Tovi, we are to test the population for magic potential. We require additional sorcerers in our battle against Keariris, and so the king kindly requests that any who may wield magic volunteer to join us on our journey back to Temes, and by doing so, defend your homes,”

The crowd began muttering again, families whispering anxiously to one another, but Damien was unmoved. He knew he was very unlikely to possess magic, as there had never been any signs, but it was possible that others with less idea of what forms magic could take may be revealed.

Instead, Damien watched on as the central knight motioned his head, and two of the knights disembarked their horses and strode into the square. They began to force people into vague lines, but behind them, the lead knight had climbed down off of his mare as well, and had pulled a small cloth bag from the depths of his horse’s saddlebag. The cloth was a deep purple, the colour of royalty, and judging by the man’s careful handling, it contained something precious.

The knights walked closer to Damien, and sent him and others around him backwards into their line. Damien looked at the nearer knight curiously, noting a lock of curly brown hair had fallen carelessly out of the edge of his visor, and raised an eyebrow at the man when he attempted to push Damien in the right direction.

He had no intention of going against the knights’ orders, but he did find some entertainment in their attempts at control. Damien was not a trained fighter, but he was strong and burly, and stood a few inches higher than either of the knights who were currently walking around the square. There was little chance they could force him where he didn’t want to go.

He held his ground a moment longer, but when the knight began to become disgruntled and barked out a sharp “Move!”, Damien obeyed.

He walked quietly to the end of the line, creating a physical barrier between the knights and some of the younger kids. They crowded behind his legs, as though he could protect them, and although he was a little uncomfortable with how close they had decided to get, he didn’t want to cause a commotion, not in front of the knights.

Instead, he stood quietly and waited as he was forced closer and closer to the front of the line. More people had been pushed behind him, most by knights who had travelled further out into the outskirts of the village to gather the remaining fifty odd people who lived there or had been out hunting for dinner. They were less subdued than those who had been standing in the square for a while, but their squabbling had faded by the time the church bells rang to mark the hour.

Damien was a few people from the front still when he finally caught a glimpse of the device that was being used to test the magic potential. He spotted it over the heads of the people ahead, and the sight caused his eyes to uncharacteristically widen in surprise.

He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t the small translucent crystal that the knight bore, still padded by the purple cloth.

A Venirox.

It was rare to see one nowadays, since they had belonged to the nymphs under the old queen, but they held powers beyond the average crystal. Most crystals would glow under the contact of someone magical, but Venirox would glow different colours dependent on the predominant magic an individual had. They were also far more sensitive, reacting to people with little magic, and Damien suddenly realised that the knights weren’t looking for powerful sorcerors. They were looking for any sorcerors.

The battle must have been going more badly than they liked to advertise.

In the time he had been wondering, Damien reached the front and the knight ordered him strictly “Put your hand on the crystal.”

Damien reached out his left hand slowly, not fearful of the rock as he knew it wouldn’t hurt him. Besides, he wasn’t a conduit of magic. He already knew that.

He placed his hand lightly on the Venirox anyway, and the knight tilted his head down to check the colour of the rock. It was unchanged.

The man nodded. “Go,” he stated, and Damien moved on without hesitation. Just beyond the man, a knight stood with a small pot of dark paint, and he daubed the back of Damien’s strong hand with a single line, then sent him on to join the rest of the villagers, who were forced to wait in the square until the knights were finished.

He glanced around to note that nearly everyone had a line on their hand as well, but there were a couple who had large ‘M’s painted on in a lighter green, no doubt designed to be clearly visible. Talk of ‘volunteers’ or not, it was becoming increasingly evident that the knights were here to take anyone with the slightest glimmering of magical power.

He stood silently in the amassed crowd, watching disinterestedly as the knights continued on to the last few people, when suddenly a body crashed into him from the side.

Damien looked down, arm automatically moving to brush them away, but froze as he saw the blonde wisps of Marienne’s hair.

“Hello,” he greeted lowly, and she looked up at him with a distraught expression.

“Damien, I have magic- they- they are going to take me but- I don’t want to fight,” she blurted out, panic lining the edges of her cheeks and darting around her temple.

He reached out and picked up her right hand, lifting it up to see the ‘M’ decorating it, and she grabbed hold of his hand as he did so.

Damien noticed as her eyes followed his, then she turned over his other hand to see the line struck across it. No magic. Her deep brown eyes began to well with tears, and she cried quietly into his side, so he wrapped an arm across her shoulders as they stood there.

Damien wasn’t really sure what he was meant to do, and thought vaguely that the situation had been easier to make sense of before Marienne had shown up, but he stood there in silence and watched as the few remaining people were processed.

Behind him, Henry and another little boy, Kyle (who sometimes lurked around the shop alongside his friend), caught his eye as they moved stealthily backwards through the crowd.

They appeared at the edge of the square, visible again once free of the adults who blocked them from sight, and Damien saw as they tried to make a break for it whilst the knights weren’t watching.

They moved fast, but it was the work of seconds for the nearest knight to draw his sword with a ringing of metal, and place it down in front of the two wide-eyed boys. Kyle tripped over his feet as he tried to stop running, and the knight stared balefully down at them.

Damien presumed that the man said something to them, although he was too far away to hear anything, because the children came running back to their families, under the watchful eye of at least a few of the knights.

The message was clear. They still couldn’t leave.

“Thank you all for your patience. Those with magic potential will be welcomed into the king’s army. Please join me here now, and the rest of you will be allowed to resume your daily routine,” the knight ordered them all, standing oddly tall without his horse in front of the church entrance.

A few people moved in the crowd, with two of the older boys moving out proudly with the ‘M’ bore clearly on their hands, but nobody else moved.

The knight waited a few more moments, and Damien sensed amusement in his tone when he spoke again.

“No more?” he asked rhetorically, and Marienne froze against him, curling towards him to hide the mark on her own hand.

“Very well then. As you exit the square, we will check to ensure that you are all showing your loyalty to the king,”

Damien thought it sounded a little ominous, and in the wake of the announcement, there was a mixed ripple of fear and relief that spread through the people. He wondered just who had noticed the meaning behind the message, because there seemed to be little reason for relief when nobody was going to get away with anything.

He started to walk over to the exit of the square, Marienne still pressed against him, and he moved back a little uncomfortably away from her warm body as they moved.

He made for one of the guards, and immediately Marienne whimpered under her breath. Damien paused for a moment, inspecting Marienne’s distress, and used his thumb to experimentally try to wipe away a bit of the paint on her hand.

It came off, far more easily than Damien had expected, and he continued until all that was left was a straight line. It was still a bright green though, so he wondered for a moment, looking around to see if there was anything he could use for dye, and failing. Instead, he bit his thumb lightly and smeared a few drops of blood over the green, hoping to make it appear darker than it was, and shifted his cloak to cover her hand in shadow.

They began moving again towards the alley, the closest route from their house to the square, and Damien made sure to tangle them in the crowd so that they would perhaps be overlooked. As they drew nearer, Damien carefully placed his hand over Marienne’s so that he could attempt to hide her mark a little better.

“Hand,” the knight in the centre of the alleyway said to them flatly, and Damien nodded to him and withdrew both their hands from his cloak, showing off the dark green of his own mark and flashing Marienne’s altered one in his direction.

He thought for a moment, perhaps, it had worked, but looking up, Damien saw the knight’s eyes flash with interest and realised that no, they hadn’t fooled anyone.

Instead, the knight motioned lightly with his far hand to another nearby knight, who was watching the crowd. He walked over, and the first knight said to the newcomer “Her,”

“No!” Marienne cried out, writhing in Damien’s grasp, and he automatically let go of her arms, and she sprinted out, past the first knight and down the alley.

Damien didn’t move.

Further down, Marienne was nearing the corner, where the dimming light was casting long shadows, and was almost free to run back to their house when a third knight emerged from around the corner, holding out his sword and forcing Marienne to stop abruptly lest she be run through with it.

“Back,” the first knight said in a bored tone, and the new knight kept her at sword point, advancing so that she had no option but to walk back to them, hysteria forced into control by the weight of her life hanging in the balance.

She walked backwards a few paces, then turned and scurried back to Damien’s side, hiding behind his back, and Damien watched as the third knight walked calmly up to him, reached his arm behind Damien and pulled Marienne out of his shadow, gripping her arm tight as Damien stood stock-still.

“Help me!” she shouted, both at him and everyone who was left in the square.

Damien didn’t move.

“You’re meant to be my fiancé, help me,” she begged desperately, vitriol entering her tone, and Damien wondered what he was meant to do.

“I can’t,” he said blankly, and something in Marienne’s face shuttered.

“I love you,” she whispered, hanging limp in the knight’s strong hold, and her eyes fixed beseechingly on his. “I love you,”

He didn’t respond.

The knights began to move back towards the lead knight, the one with the blue plumage at the back of the square, where Damien could see a small group of villagers placed. The ones who had gone of their own free will hadn’t been dragged and manhandled, not the way that Marienne had been whilst he watched on silently, but they were trapped behind the knights all the same.

People continued to leave all around him, but Damien didn’t move. He watched Marienne instead, seeing as her despair faded into hope and faded into hatred and faded into quiet resignation. She always was quick to give in.

When the crowd was gone, the knights finally moved, one keeping an eye on the few people who remained standing there, and Damien half expected to be thrown out. They didn’t seem to care that he was there though.

Now that the watching eyes were mostly gone, the knights placed cuffs on the small group, and Damien thought to count that there were five people stood there. The two eager boys were brothers, and they’d be fine, but the ancient healer Yttril was bent and withered in place, without even Marienne supporting him. Damien noted too that Leon was amongst the group, standing as tall as he could, but defiantly staring away from the knights.

Damien glanced over to see Henry and his mother standing there, staring back at the head of their family. Henry was going to have to step up now, or he would suffer the consequences alongside his mother.

“Leave,” the lead knight commanded his knights, and the dozen odd soldiers moved out, surrounding the newly declaimed sorcerers and ensuring they wouldn’t escape. It wasn’t like any of them knew how to use magic, not for anything more than helping crops to grow, because the secret of using magic had largely died out with the overthrew of the dryads and the subsequent loss of nearly all of the humanoid magical beings.

They had gone to Keariris, and now the remnants of the magic they had left behind would be used against them. By Marienne.

Damien stood still and watched them leave, wondering if he ought to be sad, or crying like Henry, or relieved that he no longer had to work out what Marienne and he were to each other. Had been.

Instead, he watched until they were out of sight, and walked home alone.

________________________________________

He was asleep in his and Marienne’s bed (which was oddly cold after the events of the day) but downstairs there was a loud clunk like something had fallen over. It probably wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but Damien woke up immediately with adrenaline pumping through his body.

He took a moment to register the likely disproportionate response, then grabbed the lantern from the bedside table and stood up. He reached over to check Marienne was okay, felt the empty air and withdrew his hand. Right, she was gone.

Instead, he walked quietly towards the door, opened it without a sound and crept down the sides of the stairs onto the ground floor. The wood felt cold beneath his feet, but Damien was more concerned by the fact that he couldn’t see anything out of place in the room. What had the noise been?

He tried to think of it again, to picture the way it had sounded inside his mind, and suddenly thought that maybe it had been a little familiar. It could have been the loud thump that the bolt of the window made whenever he closed up the forgery for the night.

Damien quickly glanced around the room, thankful for the flickering light of the candle lantern, and grabbed the dagger that he had brought inside earlier. It wasn’t much, but he was sure he would be able to defend himself okay against whatever creature or burglar had found their way inside.

He hoped it wasn’t a Calygreyhound though. They were a pain to deal with, always mucking up his shelves when they got in, and their claws weren’t something he had ever been particularly fond of.

He listened quietly at the door for a moment, taking a second to readjust the grip of the dagger, then swung open the door in one graceful movement, lashing out with the dagger even as he brought the lantern up to shine a light on the room.

Inside, there was nothing.

Damien paused in confusion, having been sure that there had been a noise. He looked up, to the window shutters, and found that the bolt had indeed been knocked out of place. It was resting on the shutters where it should be holding fast in its brackets, so there had been an attempt to put it back as well.

Human, then.

“I know you’re here,” Damien called out to the seemingly empty room, and received no response, but he wasn’t overly surprised. They had, after all, made an effort to pretend that there was nobody there, and so he wondered if perhaps his burglar wasn’t prepared for a fight.

He took another step into the room, closing the door fast behind him, and swung the lantern around again. The shop wasn’t big, with the forge and his working area taking up a good half of the room, and shelves lined three of the walls in their entirety. The window was set in the fourth wall, where the wall itself was only counter-high so that passers-by could stop to buy his goods. There were a lot of things lying around, sure, but it wasn’t an easy place to hide in.

His green eyes flickered around the room, noting the places that someone could hide in, and stepped carefully over to the shelves where he had a sword tucked away, ready to be sold for protection in the woods for travellers, and ready for his usage in the meantime.

Damien offered up a quick hope that the intruder didn’t have any fighting skills of their own, as he himself wasn’t practiced in it, and turned his back to the wall and faced the rest of the room.

“Show yourself,” he ordered, his voice monotone and almost disinterested. He catalogued the likelihood of someone hiding in each place around the room, and focused in on the darkness beneath his working station, where he kept his tools.

They were likely one of the most expensive things in the room, and a likely target.

He held the lantern up in one hand, the sword firm in the other, and strode over to the bench. His footsteps were soft but audible, and so when he bent down, it wasn’t entirely unexpected for a fist to fly out in a valiant attempt to punch him on the nose.

Damien instinctively reared backwards, allowing the fist to impact on thin air, and he hurriedly dropped the lantern to free up his other hand.

He reached out with the free hand, moving quickly to ensure that he wasn’t about to be impaled by some stick or dagger, and grabbed hold of a limb, latching on and dragging the figure out into the open space in the centre of the forgery.

Legs flailed blindly as he did so, and Damien had to hurriedly dodge a few more well-aimed blows, but the figure stopped lashing out in favour of drawing into a defensive position on the ground.

Damien watched them carefully, as best as he could in the darkness that permeated through the room, and edged backwards to fumble for the lantern, sword pointed in the direction of the intruder to warn against any further attacks.

He didn’t want to use it, especially not as the would-be burglar appeared unarmed, but he would if pushed to it.

He pulled the lantern forwards and stood upright, the sharp end of the sword holding steady. The shadow shifted slightly, but remained crouched under the implied threat, and Damien was finally able to hold the lantern up and see who it was that had broken in.

“Who are you,” he asked again, able to see now that the intruder was a small figure, so likely a woman or a child. A feisty one too, judging by the sheer amount of blows they had tried to rain down on him.

He crouched down again, careful not to get too close in case they tried to attack and run, and shone the light over their head. The flames cast a flickering warmth over the shadow, and he was somewhat surprised to note the thick curtain of hair that blocked the face from sight. Under the orange glow of the lantern, the young girl’s hair shone a deep ginger, as though it itself was burning too, and Damien noted the richness of the material that she wore as a shirt. It was wearing thin, but the quality itself was highly made.

“Tell me why you are here,” he ordered, and bent forwards to force the girl’s hand down from her face so that he could see if he recognised her.

She growled quietly, and he almost didn’t register the warning sound in time before she had launched herself at him, lantern and all, and began flailing with all her might.

He lifted the sword in quick response, and brought the hilt down hard on her head.

She fell to the floor, unconscious.


	2. Chapter 2

When Adara was very young, she had had an imaginary friend.  
Her name was Guinevere, like the legends, and Guinevere thought that Adara was funny and nice. They played games together all day long; played hopscotch and climbed trees and laughed until they fell over and laughed some more.  
Guinevere was the one who pulled faces at Adara when the girl was forced to sit with her parents at the dinner table, and the one who giggled at the strange clothing that visitors to the royal table wore. Guinevere herself always wore bright clothing and trousers that Adara always coveted, and when they were alone, Adara thought of nothing else but the next game they could play.  
And when Adara was older, Guinevere disappeared, never to be seen again.  
Adara thought of her old friend now, as she stood in front of the mirror and willed her hair to stay in its arranged place. Lucy, the maid, had painted berry juice onto her lips and they glistened poison red as she gently touched them, and came away with stained red fingertips.  
“My lady,” Adara heard Leif say softly from behind her, and she glanced up to see him bow in the reflection of the mirror. His clothing was perfect, as always, and when he stood again, not a single silver hair had fallen out of place. She had always envied his grace.  
“Do I have to?” she asked, and he straightened with a sigh.  
“Yes, Adara. You have to,” he murmured, and she turned around to face him with a frown.  
“I’d really much prefer not to,” she mentioned, as though it were an off-hand comment, and he grinned resignedly at her.  
“We both know that,” he pointed out gently, and then continued “But it’ll be exciting to see what magic you have!”   
Adara weakly put on a smile. “Yeah… I have an idea,” she admitted, and Leif put a hand on her shoulder.  
“Let’s go and both pretend to have fun. It’ll be fine in the end, your father will make sure of it,” he offered, and she smiled up at him thankfully. “Besides, you only receive a Revealing once, so it’s bound to have some drama!”  
“Yes, remember Sable’s?” Adara giggled, and Leif laughed fondly with her, as though he hadn’t ever seen the colour of the sparks that had crackled from her auburn hair the first time Kaera yelled.  
No, there were no surprises to be had today.  
The man leaned in and hugged Adara tightly, careful not to knock her hair askew, and whispered quietly to her “Just- be careful. Don’t react to what the others will say,”  
Adara smiled back, happy but subdued, and the curve of her lips seemed suddenly older than her sixteen years, tinged with fierce apprehension.  
“You know I can’t promise that,” she replied, and felt rather than heard the man sigh.  
“I know. But be careful anyway,” he murmured, and drew back, fixing the robe straight on his shoulders and holding out a yellow buttercup for her.  
Adara smiled again, happier this time, and took the buttercup from his outstretched fingers, weaving it carefully into her hair. It clashed with her reddish locks and deep green clothes, but Adara liked it there anyway. Her father would give her her first lotus during the ceremony, but she was quite happy to cling on to her childhood for a little longer.  
Ceremony ceremony ceremony

After the ceremony was over, Adara was expected to stay a while and accept the congratulations of the guests, ignoring the fact that most of them hated her and they came because they were obliged and not because they wanted to.  
“Congratulations, Princess Adara,” Sable said with a sickeningly sweet smile. Adara bared her teeth in response, pretending as though it was a smile.  
“Thanks,” she responded dismissively, turning away as though the conversation bored her and pretending not to glow in triumph as the smile slipped off of the other girl’s face.   
Sable took a step forwards, as if to continue the conversation, and Adara turned her head back towards her as quick as a whip. “Careful there Sable, wouldn’t want you to fall and hurt yourself, would we,” she said, and Sable blushed a deep burgundy at the reminder of her own Revealing, where she had stumbled on the way to the main altar.   
Adara snickered lightly, and the girl rushed off, finally leaving Adara alone. She rolled her eyes, and paced over to the food table, grabbing a few cakes and munching on them as an excuse not to talk to anyone.  
Across the way, her father looked up and saw her, and pointedly looked at her treasures. Adara shrugged in response, and took another bite.  
Behind her, Leif walked up.   
“That wasn’t nice,” he scolded, and Adara found herself rolling her eyes again.  
“Please. She doesn’t want to be here, I don’t want her here; why should we pretend?” she scoffed, and frowned as Leif gave her a disappointed look.  
“You know I’m right. Don’t bother channelling my father Leif- here, have a cake,” She shoved a cake in his direction, and the man took the sticky treat with a slight grimace.  
“Fire then,” he said, as though somehow continuing a conversation they hadn’t been having, and Adara froze, then convinced herself to move again.  
“Fire,” she agreed stonily. She had suspected, although she hadn’t told anyone else, and she wasn’t looking forwards to the rest of the tribe having another reason to hate her.  
“Guess you’d better start quickly on the control lessons,” Leif commented, and Adara scowled, fighting the urge to yell at him for such an inane comment. She hated being treated like a child.  
“It’s alright for some,” she muttered, glaring the opposite way down the hall at Cedar, the son of Pomfery, one of her father’s advisors. His Revealing had taken place a couple of moons before, and he had the power of Water, rare amongst the tribe and highly treasured. Most had Earth and Air, both of which were greatly beneficial to everyday life and with their own special skillsets.   
Her father had been hoping for Air, she knew it. Air types were best at mind magics, and a monarch with mind magics could rule peacefully for decades. She was suddenly fiercely glad that she had Fire, just to spite him.  
But the truth was- Fire was the least helpful. She had always known (As had everyone around her) that subtlety wasn’t her strong point, but to receive the element capable only of destruction?  
It was a sign of bad luck.   
Besides, who knew how long it would be before she wound up burning down the whole camp?  
“Good luck,” Leif said suddenly, and she looked up, startled out of her thoughts, to see her father bearing down on the pair of them.  
“Joy,” she muttered, and set a weak farce of a smile on her face.  
“Father,” Adara greeted with a small amount of forced cheer.   
“Adara,” the man said, and nodded to Leif. Adara tried to judge his tone, failed, and bit into another cake instead.  
“I am pleased to see you enjoying this special occasion,” he said to them both, then clasped Adara’s elbow tightly in his hand. He nodded again to Leif in farewell.  
Adara hissed at him under her breath “Get. Off.”  
The man didn’t respond, and instead guided them both to the corner of the room, where they could talk in peace. Adara wondered whether she could appear somewhere else, anywhere else, if she wished hard enough.  
“Fire,” he said, and Adara concluded that she had not mysteriously gained the power of teleportation.  
“Fire,” she responded, and looked up, staring straight at his eyes and challenging him to say anything about it.  
“I should have known,” he grinned harshly, finally releasing her arm, and she immediately took a step back from him.  
“There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m unique amongst the tribe, just like you wanted,” she bit off, and he smiled pityingly down at her.  
“Yes. You are a danger to us all, congratulations,” her father responded, and she shrugged, knowing it would irritate him more.  
“If only mother was here, maybe she could show me how to control it,” Adara said in a mockingly light tone. “Oh no wait- I forgot- you banished her,” 

“Adara, how dare you injure another dryad?” her father seethed, and Adara bares her teeth in a silent snarl.  
“You think I wanted to hurt Leif? He’s more of a father to me than you are!” she yelled, and momentarily, the man looked taken aback.  
“That’s not fair,” he growled out, and Adara raised a pointed eyebrow smugly, relishing in the power she held over her father.   
“Really? So why is he the one teaching me Control when everyone knows that that’s the father’s job?” she asked mockingly, and he stepped towards her in barely controlled anger.  
“You know I’m the king! I may l- you may be my daughter, but I have a duty to both you and the kingdom and you should know it! You should be old enough to understand by now, Adara!” he yelled back, and she scoffed, surprised at the tears that sprang to her eyes as she did so.  
“Yeah? And was it duty that forced you to exile mum? Or was that your own fragile ego,” she spat, and he staggered back now. “You weren’t doing your duty by exiling the only person in this tribe with Fire. You weren’t protecting people and don’t even pretend you were, because I know the truth. I know you forced her to leave because she fell in love with a man outside the tribe and you couldn’t handle that-“  
“I didn’t exile her!” he roared, and it was Adara’s turn to stumble in shock.  
“What- don’t lie to me, Father. Don’t you dare tell me another lie,” she ordered, and felt the air twist itself around her words as they slithered through the empty space between them to wrap themselves around her father’s tongue.  
A Compulsion.   
“No, wait-“ Adara stuttered out, her mind reeling as she realised what she had done. Leif had been teaching her compulsions (an easy exercise for Control) but she had never managed it before.  
“I didn’t exile her,” the man whispered, and Adara stared at him aghast. He wasn’t lying.  
“Why- why would you tell me you had? Why would you make me hate you for something- something you didn’t do?” she cried out, feeling her Fire begin to spark dangerously on her skin as it reacted to her emotions.  
“Because she was killed!” the words came rushing out, desperate to be heard in the cold air that lingered in the room, and the Fire crept forwards to greet them, to take them in and burn them before Adara had to process the truth.  
“Who killed her?” Adara asked, closing her eyes to try and maintain her fraying control.   
There was no response.  
“You can’t lie to me. You will not lie to me. Tell me the truth,” Adara ordered, and () smiled in anguish at the authoritative tone of the woman in front of him, even as they both felt the weight of the words he had to force out weighing heavy on their shoulders.  
“King Tovi,”  
“You mean- the man who- he killed her for the throne?” Adara forced out, trying to wrap her mind around the betrayal. She didn’t remember much from the time of the Revolt, over a decade earlier, but every Dryad was told the story of Tovi’s usurpation of the throne of Exura.   
() may rule over Keariris now, but the elder of the Dryads who recalled Exura all said that it was nothing compared to the lands that they had ruled and roamed before.   
“Yes. I tried to stop him- but- she wouldn’t let him take it. She refused to leave, but I had to get you and the tribe out-“ he was trembling in front of her, and Adara wanted suddenly to go backwards and tell herself that everything she knew was about to be taken away.  
“Do you understand what I mean, Adara?” he asked after a long while, piecing together his pieces of reality. “My loyalty cannot just be to you. It can never just be to you,”  
“But my loyalty- it has never been to you,” she admitted, and he smiled helplessly at her.   
“It was the price I had to pay for keeping you here,” he said, and she took in the words and wondered what they meant.  
“Why-“   
“You must not

“Ah!” Leif winced, his tone a little hurt, and Adara opened her eyes wide hurriedly, seeing his dark skin blacken under her touch.  
“Leif! I’m so sorry!” she cried out in distress, glaring at the candle that he had been trying to help her to calm enough to light.

Adara felt her world crack a little under the new truth it had to encompass, and Fire exploded around her. It leapt from her hair, where it had been fighting to escape for a while, and burnt a track through the mossy carpet, encircling the wooden walls in seconds and filling up the air with smoke.   
She could hear, muted like a sound from a distance, her father yelling at her to stop, but Adara wasn’t the one in control of Fire. Fire was in control of her, and as it filled her up with fiery anger, she realised what Leif had been talking about in their lessons. No, the problem wasn’t that she was scared of her magic and what it could do. It wasn’t even that she couldn’t take back power over it if she wanted to.  
It was that, if it was in control, then she didn’t have to be.  
Adara let the world slip out of focus for a couple of moments, her vision reduced to the bright orange flames that protected her, and then she allowed it to leave her the way it wanted to. Fire spread out from her body in a jagged circle, burning viciously through anything it touched, and as Adara looked up, her father was furiously battering at it with his Air, but they were no match for one another.  
They had all been right. She wasn’t supposed to be here. Her Fire wasn’t suited for a tribe of dryads, wasn’t suited to rule over a land of mostly peaceable creatures, and the Fire helped her see clearly what it was she had to do.  
“Goodbye,” she whispered quietly, knowing that nobody could hear her, and then she swallowed down her tears, and pulled back the rampaging Fire. Where it had been released, her home continued to burn, and Adara turned around and walked out of the holes it had left in its wake, leaving behind her father and the kingdom that she wasn’t fit to rule over.  
There was only one option.   
She would find King Tovi and kill him. Maybe then she could be worthy of a kingdom, but she was not worthy of Keariris.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Missing multiple scenes- 
> 
> The Ceremony  
> The bit after where Leif shows her Control and she burns him  
> Adara actually running away  
> Adara's journey to Cirrane


	3. Chapter 3

Danny stood upright with a sigh, cracking his back with one hand as he stared down at the girl who lay spread out on the bed.  
He’d felt a little bad about knocking her out so brutally; she hadn’t really given him much of a choice but she was going to have one hell of a headache later, he knew it.   
In the meantime, he’d carried her upstairs, out of the cold workshop and laid her out on the bed, which was marginally more warm and infinitely more comfortable. She wasn’t under the covers, but Damien really wasn’t sure what the correct etiquette was for ‘burglars who turn out to be young girls that you knocked out anyway’ but it seemed to be going okay so far.  
He’d toyed with the idea of just leaving her outside as well, seeing as he didn’t actually have any obligation to her, but that had seemed a little harsh given the layers of frost that coated his window-sills each morning.   
Just because he didn’t necessarily like her dind’t mean she had to die.  
Damien stared down at her for a second longer, seeing her face properly now, and although her eyes were closed, her features were sharp and almost fae in their symmetry. There was a dark purple bruise swelling on her forehead, contrasting nicely with her shock of orange hair, and if he’d cared about his bed getting dirty, he would have put down a towel because her clothes were almost caked in mud.  
As it was, he decided that he’d ask Marienne to wash them the next day.  
He realised after a moment that that wasn’t possible. He resolved to wash them himself.  
Damien had two chairs downstairs that they usually used for breakfast, so he walked back downstairs, trusting that the unconscious girl would remain that way for at least a few hours longer, and poured himself a pint of beer, fresh from the tavern a couple days back.  
He wasn’t hungry, given that it was still very early hours in the morning, so instead he finished his drink, grabbed a chair and some mediocre rope that had been lying in the corner of the workshop, and set back upstairs. It was the work of minutes to tie the girl up, mostly tying her hands and ankles together and then tying them to the bed, and he settled down on the chair he’d brought up. She wasn’t going to be up for a while, but Damien felt the need to learn more about her (or at least work out what she wanted to steal so that he could tie it down a little more securely).  
He blew out the candle that rested still on the bedside table, and closed his eyes wearily. The rope would stop her escaping, at least long enough for him to catch a few more hours of sleep,   
When he woke up again, it was to the sight of the girl struggling furiously against her bonds. They were tied tightly, far too tightly for her to squirm out of, but Damien was fairly certain that she would have eventually managed it given that he hadn’t actually wanted her hands to go completely numb in the meantime.  
She stopped her struggles as soon as she saw that he was watching her, and instead turned curiously purple eyes to watch him. They narrowed in intense anger, and she growled again, just as she had last night.  
“How dare you tie me up! Untie me right now! You- you pervert!” she spat out, and Damien blinked calmly at her.  
His bushy eyebrows furrowed towards his forehead as he glanced down at her bonds and realised that maybe tying a girl to his bed hadn’t been the best mannered way of fixing the situation, but then he mentally shrugged. He was hardly in the wrong here.  
“No,” he said to her, and her face shuttered in blank confusion, horror and back to vicious anger.  
“I’ll- I’ll scream!” she threatened and Damien sighed.  
“Don’t,” he commanded her and she bared her teeth anyway, appearing to inhale in preparation for a screaming fit.  
Damien stood up and grabbed the wad of socks from the pile of clothing in his wardrobe. He walked over to her, and shoved the socks into her mouth.  
“I’ll take them out when you are civil,” he told her, and then glanced up at the sky. It was a little later than he was used to- Marienne always woke at the strike of the clock, but clearly he had overslept with the change in his routine.  
He debated the merits of going out and doing his deliveries, then coming back and dealing with the girl, but then Damien thought of the events of the previous day and decided that the deliveries could wait. Nobody else was going to be waiting for them that avidly after all.  
“I will bring you food,” he told the girl “and then you can explain why you were stealing from me,”  
Her eyes widened in indignation and she began trying to spit the socks out and wriggle free of the rope with a renewed vigour.  
Damien rolled his eyes in exasperation and left her alone, choosing instead to head downstairs and put together a small breakfast of bread and cheese for them both, not bothering with meat for himself and not wanting to waste any expensive meat on the girl.  
Marienne would have taken pity the moment she saw her.  
Marienne had always been weak.  
He climbed back upstairs, and sat down next to the girl.   
“Food. Tell me who you are, and I may let you go. Stay, I will give you to the knights,” he told her, neglecting to mention that the knights were long gone. He suspected that she had no idea of how the village worked, seeing as he had no idea who she was and Damien knew the faces of most around the village.  
She growled low in her throat, and glared at him. He raised an eyebrow. She lay her head back down on the pillow, and Damien leant over and pulled out the socks.  
She didn’t say a word.  
Well, at least she’s not screaming, Damien thought wryly, and decided to untie her hands and legs as well.  
“Name,” he ordered her, feeling a dawning sense of amusement at the flash of anger that lingered in obstinate eyes as her lips remained sealed shut. Apparently, it was all extremes with her.  
“…Damien,” he said, and the girl snorted, tossing her head disdainfully even as she slowly sat up in the bed. She glanced beseechingly at the food, and Damien held it up in the air, ready for her to take as soon as he learnt her name.  
“Name,” he said again, and she seemed to wilt a little even as her eyes narrowed.  
“Adara,” she spat out and Damien handed her the plate. She began to dig in hungrily, and he wondered what he was meant to do now.  
It had perhaps been a bit of an overreaction to tie her down, but Damien had felt it necessary on an instinctual level. He had been somewhat responsible for her situation, but now that she was awake, unharmed and fed, there were only really two options; report her for breaking in, or let her go.  
He knew that there was a constable two towns over who would try her for her crimes, but the last burglar that had been tried had lost their hand. Damien was angry that she had tried to steal from him, but not that angry.  
Besides, in the daytime he was more interested in why she had been in his shop in the first place, instead of making her pay for a crime he had really stopped her from doing.  
He decided.  
“If you stay, explain why you were stealing. If you don’t, I had better never see you again,” Damien warned her, standing up and taking his plate with him. “I won’t report you this time, Adara,” he added, using her name, although mostly to spite her as she’d been so reluctant to give him a name in the first place.  
She glared at him some more, so he shrugged, left the door open and walked downstairs into the smithery.   
He spent the day in the shop, and as predicted, nobody asked about the late opening in the morning. They had all been busy too.  
A few people gave him pitying looks when they came by, and Damien ignored them all. He didn’t see hide nor hair of Henry all day, which was kind of expected, but he wondered if he should be feeling sad about that too.  
It was pretty much time to lock up again before he saw the girl appear.  
\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
“Oh, Damien, I’m so sorry,” Lydia gushed, placing her hand on his arm, and Damien grunted in response, shaking off her hand with a shrug and a turn back to his forge.  
“What would you like?” he asked gruffly, and she pursed her lips over the counter, leaning on it as though to better see into his shop, although he knew that she was a baker and thus unlikely to need more than the pots and pans that were laid out along the shelves easily visible from the counter. They were, after all, often purchased.  
He glanced over to her, and rolled his eyes as he noticed her piercing blue eyes were set on him. How did she think this was going to work out?  
“Pot?” he asked bluntly, and she jumped a little, then looked up coyly and shook her head.   
“It must be so hard for you,” Lydia said, and suddenly Damien heard a voice from behind him reply.  
“What must be hard?” Adara asked, and Damien glared at her as he turned around.

“Go away,” he growled, and she rolled her eyes at him, which appeared a deeper purple than he had previously thought   
“As if I care what you tell me to do,” she laughed cruelly, and turned back to Lydia, who was looking a little shocked.  
“What must be hard for him?” she asked Lydia bluntly, and Damien sighed.   
“In.” he ordered, grabbing hold of her shoulder tightly and manhandling her back towards the door.   
“No,” she hissed. “Get off me,” Adara shook his hand off roughly, and Damien raised an eyebrow.   
Lydia tutted loudly from behind, and said “Dear, I didn’t know you had a daughter!”  
Damien felt his eyes widen in surprise and horrified shock, and turned to Adara to see a similar expression on her face.   
“She is not. She is not staying,” he told Lydia and Adara firmly, but the girl had already wriggled her way free and skipped lightly over to the counter.   
“What were you talking about, miss?” she asked, faux sweetness colouring her voice and Damien growled lowly, regretting not leaving her tied up to the bed.   
“Oh, I was comforting him,” Lydia explained, batting her eyelashes up at Damien, who was standing with his arms crossed far back in the moggy shop.  
“Comforting him?” Adara prompted, and Lydia happily continued on. Damien wondered whether anyone would notice if he stuffed Adara in a sack and tossed her on a cart headed far far away.  
“Yes, the poor dear. Can you believe it, only yesterday I saw Marienne in the market selling those charms of hers, and now-“  
“Did she die?” Adara blurted out, and Damien’s scowl deepened.   
Lydia’s eyes narrowed. “Did you not even tell her?” she accused Damien, who stomped forwards to meet her.  
“She is not my daughter,” he hissed out, but was at a loss how to explain it better. “She doesn’t know Marienne, and I’d thank you to let it stay that way,”  
Adara leapt forwards and latched onto his arm, looking up at him balefully and saying “Of course I know Marienne! I was just asking where she was, only a few minutes ago!”  
Damien stopped to wonder at her malicious duplicity, and Lydia continued on with her spiel.  
“Yes, engaged to be wed, and now she’s off to join the king’s army! How sorry I am, Damien,” she murmured, and he frowned.  
“Thanks,” he said shortly, and she smiled up at him. Adara took a step back, and he pulled down a pot from the shelf that Lydia might like.  
“I’m closing. Do you want a pot or not?” he asked curtly, and she blinked, like she was coming out of a trance and nodded.  
“Uh- yes please, a pot would be very welcome,” she regained, and Damien grunted assent.  
“Two shillings,” Damien stated, and Lydia pulled out her purse with a quick fumble, and held out the requested money.  
He put his hand out to take it from her, and she dropped it lightly into his palm, stroking her fingers across his skin as she did so, and he fought to urge to recoil from her hands.  
Instead, Damien handed over the pot and placed the money in the box below the till, locking it tightly and pocketing the key out of Adara’s sight, then closed the shutters and locked them down with the bolt. The shop was a lot darker without the window of light, but Damien was not really one to care.  
He walked over to the outer door and did the same, making it hopefully impossible for anyone to get in, although he was going to have to ask Adara how she managed. The bolts were hardly light, and her skinny limbs didn’t seem particularly strong.  
He dismissed the thought, assuming that he hadn’t closed the latch properly the night before, and strode over to where Adara was still standing in the dark, grabbing her wrist and yanking her into the house. Out of the shop, the main room of the house was light and airy, decorated sparsely with Marienne’s taste, and he forced Adara into a seat.  
“Talk,” Damien said.  
Adara scowled at him, and Damien folded his arms, staring down at her with an unimpressed expression.  
“Who’s Marienne?” she asked suddenly, trying to deflect the question back to him. He snorted.   
“Good try. I don’t share my life story with children,” he said, and Adara looked up indignantly, anger flashing in her eyes.  
“Then why do I have to talk!” she retorted, and Damien dragged the other chair over, sat in it and stared at her.  
“I didn’t break into your house, did I?” he asked rhetorically, and she rolled her eyes and muttered something under her breath. He wondered if she had no shame, but her posture seemed to deflate slightly under his steady gaze.  
“I wasn’t going to steal much,” she mumbled, and Damien’s mouth crinkled into a shadow of an incredulous smile.  
“What were you going to steal then?” he asked, and she pouted.  
“….A sword,” she said, and Damien felt his other eyebrow rise to match the first. Clearly, she wasn’t from around here, even though her accent seemed to suggest such a thing.  
“Why,” he demanded.  
“I- I need one to protect myself,” Adara stated, lifting her head up proudly and meeting Damien’s gaze, but there was something about the way her fingers were fidgeting that made him disbelieve her.  
He wondered if he even wanted to know.  
“Where are you from,” he changed tactics.   
“Um- Blafen,” she said, and every instinct in Damien’s body screamed distrust.   
“Go,” he told her, and she blinked up at him in confusion.   
“What?” she repeated, raising her voice a bit from before.   
“Why did you stay if you are just going to lie? Tell the truth, or leave now,” Damien told her bluntly, and the girl whipped her head up to stare at the darkening sky through the window.  
“It’s cold! I almost died getting here!” she argued, and he glanced outside too, wondering briefly where Marienne was now, when usually they’d be cooking dinner together.  
He shook the thought off, and shrugged at Adara. “Not my problem,”   
“What is your problem!?” she shouted, and suddenly Damien heard the whisper of an accent coming through. It wasn’t familiar.  
“You are,” he replied calmly, and she hissed through her teeth at him, bolting upright with her fists clenched, as though preparing for a fight.  
“How dare you! You tied me up, and I stuck around all day anyway, and now you’re kicking me out to let me die? I could have left hours ago! I could be in the next town!” she yelled and Damien felt an unfamiliar surge of anger in his gut rise to meet her force.  
“You didn’t have to stay! You chose! All of this is your choice, so don’t play the victim! Tell me the truth, or leave,” Damien shouted back, standing up himself and towering over the girl.  
She flinched away from him, and he recoiled, realising that she was only a child and he shouldn’t be yelling at her like that.  
“I don’t know why you stayed,” he told her in a slightly calmer voice, turning to stand against the table and using it to brace himself, not wanting to go near her and scare her again. “But you did. Tell me why,”   
“…I need a sword and…I don’t know where the knights are,”  
“The knights?”  
“…Fine,” Adara sighed, and sat back down in the chair, her hands folded deceptively demurely in her lap, and Damien took his seat opposite her again.  
“I’m- not from Blafen,” she said slowly, and Damien huffed out an amused breath.  
“Tell me something I don’t know,”   
“I’m from Keariris. The knights- the king took my mother,” she explained. “So- I’ve come to- to bring her back-“  
“-And the sword?”  
“-Or to revenge her,” Adara ended, her head bowed, and Damien stared at her critically.   
“You understand that’s treason?” he asked, and she nodded, barely moving her head with the movement, and Damien considered for a second.  
“Okay,” he said, standing up and pulling out some vegetables from the cupboard, lying them down on the table and walking over to the draws to grab a knife.  
“Okay- what does that mean?” Adara demanded, the meekness of moments before gone again.  
“It means okay,” Damien shrugged, turning his back on her and beginning to chop the onion.  
“Do I- do you want me to leave?” Adara asked, and Damien pondered the thought. He did want her to leave; he was quite fond of his peace and quiet, but the girl had already decided she didn’t want to leave in the dark so.  
“Go tomorrow,” he said plainly, solving the issue, and she sputtered up at him.  
“But- I don’t know where to go!” she cried out.  
“Tough,”  
“I don’t even have a sword,”  
“Do you know how to use one?” Damien asked.  
“Well- no, but I’m sure I can work it out,” Adara replied a little sheepishly.  
“Then a sword is of no use to you,”  
“Yeah- well- you used a sword to attack me last night,”   
Damien levelled her with a gaze over his half-sliced onions. “Attack?” he queried, and she coloured.  
“Okay, but you did knock me out with it…wait, do you know how to use a sword?” Adara asked excitedly, and Damien quickly shut her down.  
“No,”  
“Then why do you have a sword?”  
“Protection.”  
Damien didn’t even have to look up to see that Adara’s silence was only because she was pouting at him, as though that would make him change his mind.   
“Fighting knights is suicide. I don’t care if you want to go kill yourself. But I’m not going to enable you.” He stated, and tipped his onions into the pan, along with the small potatoes that he’d bought alongside his hefty lunch at the market.  
She didn’t say another word, which Damien was beginning to realise was quite unlike her, but he relished the opportunity to eat in peace.   
\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
He had hoped that he would wake up the next day and find the girl gone, but she was unfortunately more stubborn than he had been giving her credit for, because the next day, she was up early and eating his cereal.  
“You will go today,” he told her, and she hummed, kicking her legs under the table, and continued to eat.  
And when he came back, she had prepared a soup.   
“This is disgusting,” he said plainly as soon as he walked into the room. She whirled around and blanched in indignity, placing a dirt-covered hand on one hip and glared at him.  
“You try then,” she challenged, and Damien rolled his eyes.  
“Go home,” he told her, and Adara scowled back.  
“I can be useful! Teach me to use a sword and I’ll do whatever you like!” she insisted.  
Damien stared at her. “Be more careful with your words,” he warned. “Not everyone will hate you as much as me,”   
She paled as the implications sunk in, then puffed up furiously. “You can’t hate me! I made you soup!”  
“If you don’t go, I’m going to the constable,” Damen idly threatened, and she scowled again.  
“Eat your soup,” she hissed, stomping over to the stove and pouring him a small bowl. He went to take a sip, and promptly spat it back out again.  
“How many onions are in this,” he pointedly questioned, allowing his spoon to fall back into the bowl as Adara watched on with folded arms.  
“…All of them?”  
“I bought five!”  
“Was it not meant to have five onions?”  
“….”  
He eventually gave in, standing up and pouring his bowl back into the pot. He semi-wished that he could throw the whole thing away, but the ingredients weren’t cheap, and whilst he wasn’t bad off, he wasn’t rich enough to be able to easily afford the loss.  
“Find a proper job,” he ordered Adara, covering the soup until he could get to the market to buy some more vegetables to balance it out, and taking out some pasta from its brown paper bag in the food cupboard.  
Damien wondered briefly whether he should let Adara cook it. Then he decided he actually wanted to eat that night.  
He voiced the thought out loud.  
They ate in silence.  
It was peaceful.  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
It took two weeks for Adara to wear down his defences far enough for him to even respond properly to her requests for training.  
“Adara. I’ve never been trained in the sword,” he told her bluntly, and she leapt to her feet from where she had been idling in the corner of the shop, prepared to deal with customers.  
Damien hadn’t planned on letting the girl stick around long enough to have to explain her to the rest of the village, but most people seemed to be coming to their own conclusions. He couldn’t be bothered to change whatever assumptions they’d come to.  
“But on the first night you fought with it!” she argued, and Damien sighed, putting down his block of metal, well on its way to becoming nails, to look at her straight on.  
“I used it because it looks threatening. Not because I’m efficient with it,” he explained briefly, not touching on the instinctive reaction he had had of running immediately to the sword. It wasn’t like he himself understood that.  
“I don’t need to be efficient! I just need to be able to get in close and then-“  
“And then what? A dagger?” Damien asked bluntly. “You’d be better off dressing in short skirts,”  
“Stop treating me like a helpless girl!” Adara yelled, and Damien walked over to her, using his height to cow her into listening.  
“That’s what you are. If you want to be something else, find someone else who can help you,”  
“You can- you just won’t!” she screamed at him,   
Behind them, someone coughed awkwardly.   
Damien turned around to see Rowan, here to collect his new leather-working tool, and looking rather embarrassed about it too.  
“Here,” Damien grunted, walking across the room and grabbing the awl from the shelf he had laid it on whilst he waited, and put it firmly into Rowan’s hand.  
The man handed over his fares, and smiled knowingly at Damien. “Girls. A nightmare, they can be,”  
“Yeah,” Damien responded, and in the corner Adara bared her teeth at him, out of sight of the counter, as though she would growl if she wasn’t supposed to be not drawing more attention to herself.  
“Oh, by the way, make sure you avoid the pub today,” Rowan advised as he made to leave, new awl in hand, and Damien raised a quizzical eyebrow.  
The cobbler saw it and smiled sympathetically. “Some of those damn soldiers are back, thought you might like the heads up if you were planning on going out,”  
Damien nodded in acknowledgement, and Rowan hummed, clapping him firmly on the shoulder and turning away with a parting wave.  
“Is he saying that because of Marienne?” Adara asked obtrusively, and Damien glared in irritation in her direction.   
“Thought you were ignoring me,”  
“No,”  
“I was enjoying the quiet,” he said grumpily.  
She shrugged pointedly, and picked up the knife that lay near her, twiddling it in uncaring palms even as Damien decided he didn’t care enough to intervene before she cut off a finger.  
“We’ll stay in tonight,”  
“But-“  
“No. You will not go near them,” he ordered, both of them knowing that Adara was no match for them. Damien thought it unlikely that he himself would be able to put up much of a fight (and he hadn’t done so the last time).  
Behind him, Adara sighed in defeat, and Damien finally felt as though perhaps he was making some headway in his argument.   
If he was lucky, maybe she’d leave and find someone in Temes who could actually give her a few tricks. He didn’t think she’d actually ever fight a knight, let alone with intent to kill, and he was fairly certain that the only reason she’d stuck around was because she’d lost her only family. The girl was a job away from becoming a villager, and Edgar from the farm by the river had been eyeing her thoughtfully when he came by. There was surely a job there for her soon, given that she seemed to be sticking around.  
“Promise,” he brusquely demanded of her, and was content with her muttered echo.  
He turned back to his forge, concentrating on the steady blows of his hammer, and so it was that Damien missed the fierce gleam in the girl’s eyes as she turned her head to look out of the window, and down the street towards the pub.  
He continued his work obliviously.   
Adara’s eyes flashed determinedly to where Damien kept his sword, and unnoticed, she uncrossed her fingers.  
________________________________________

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think there's no missing scenes! I haven't reread though so like there could be


	4. Chapter 4

Adara wasn’t entirely certain initially what to make of the whole situation. She had been less than pleased to wake up in binds, but then the man- Damien- had fed her, and released her.  
She was sure he hadn’t noticed her stiffen at his threat of handing her over to the guards, made that first morning, but it had been enough to get her to co-operate. She wanted to fight the guards, wanted to fight the whole kingdom if it meant she could get to King Tovi, but that would be considerably harder to do from within custody, and although she might be able to use her Fire to escape, that would risk drawing attention to herself and then she’d never get to him.  
So she’d told him her name. Adara.  
Once she was released, she’d sat in the room for a short time, confused and bemused, but had wasted no time in leaving; scraping her plate clean regardless of the fact that it was breakfast and she usually scorn a breakfast meal as greedy. It had been the work of minutes to creep out of the front door, although she had been a little distracted by investigating the house, given that she’d previously been unconscious, and then she’d accidentally walked in full view of the ajar door where Damien was working.  
Adara had panicked for a moment, then stepped back out of view, having not realised that the two places were interconnected before.  
Instead, she’d quickly pattered past it and out the open front door.   
The village looked just as peculiar as it had done the day before, when she had been looking for her next plan of action, and she recalled Damien’s comments about the knights. That meant they were still here.   
Adara decided that she would find them and follow them, and worry about finding a weapon in the next village. There had to be some between wherever she was and the capital right?  
She spent the day in the small village again, not daring to steal any bread or pie from the stalls, but she couldn’t find hide nor hair of any knights. By mid-afternoon, Adara had wandered back to the square at the centre of the village and asked someone about them, and they had given her a pitying look and told her that they all left the day before.  
She was furious for a while with Damien, but mostly she wasn’t sure what she was going to do, given that her original plan would no longer work.  
And so she’d gone back to the only person who might give her shelter for the night and some food free of charge.  
When she arrived back at the small house, the sky was darkening, and so she’d gone straight into that dark and smokery forge Damien called a blacksmith shop, and been given her first bit of insight into Damien’s life.  
The woman buying from the counter had been glamourous and fake in a way that Adara recognised and hated, but she was thankful for the small titbit about some woman called ‘Marienne’ who had apparently been Damien’s fiancé, and had instead run off to join the king’s army. She noted the information quietly, tucking it away inside her brain for use when she needed it,   
It hadn’t taken Damien long either to demand more from her, but Adara made sure to word her response very carefully. Treason was, after all, punishable by death, and she didn’t fancy giving the man another way to end her life.  
He hadn’t been kind to her, not at all, and she had possibly yelled more than they’d actually sat and talked, but Adara had realised by the end of their conversation that he was exactly what she needed.  
Damien could teach her, and then she could either work out a way to buy or borrow a sword, or she could steal one if she had to. After all, it surely wouldn’t be too hard to find out where he kept the one that he’d drawn on her the night before.  
He hadn’t been willing though, and Adara hadn’t missed being able to order others around during her travel to the village, but she greatly missed it over the first two weeks she spent with Damien. She worked hard, trying to prove to him that it would be a fair deal, and honestly if he was willing to let her stay around even without him teaching her, she didn’t see why it would be such a big deal for him to help her out.  
But plan or not, Adara had never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. The customer who had warned Damien about the knights had done her a favour, and Damien’s worries or not, she wasn’t about to sit quietly in his house whilst her first step to revenge sat drinking ale merrily in a pub down the road.  
She uncrossed her fingers and started to plan.  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
It was a great many hours later that Adara finally felt able to leave. She wasn’t fool enough to try and escape the house whilst Damien was still awake- she may have a blanket on the floor of his dining room, but she was fairly certain the man would still be able to tell if she got up and left, even from his room upstairs.   
She thought his hearing was a tad unfair. He said it was a gift for not being obnoxiously loud all the time. She yelled at him to prove his point.  
It was the early hours of the morning by the time she sat up slowly on the bed, fully dressed beneath the sheets (not that she had more than two sets of clothes that she had been wearing interchangeably day and night) and swung her legs to the side, cursing softly as she whacked a foot on the table leg and it began to throb with pain.  
Adara rolled her eyes at the sky, wondering why this always happened to her. Then she stopped being dramatic and put on her shoes.  
She stood up carefully, and walked over to the shelf where she had seen Damien place a dagger not too long ago. She hadn’t quite worked out where the sword was kept yet, but a dagger should serve her well enough for the protection she needed.  
It was easy enough to creep over to the front door, which had been bolted shut like the door and windows of the shop, but the harder part was lifting the heavy bolts off of the door. It would undoubtedly be easier from this side, and Adara had been practicing her Compulsion magic in every free moment she dared.   
If Damien tried to ignore her much longer, she thought it would make a decent back up plan.   
She had already managed to nudge open the heavy wooden planks once before, to get into the forge, so she concentrated hard on the movement she wanted, trying to channel the explosive Fire into a softer Compulsion, separating out its fiery heat from the pure energy as best she could, and propelling the latter into the bolt. Adara cheered mentally as the bolt came dislodged, shifting upwards out of the slot, and then hurried forwards to drag it free of the door before it either fell to the floor or sunk back into its strong metal holders.  
She placed it next to the door as quietly as she could, and opened the door slowly, slipping through as soon as the gap was large enough, and closing the door behind her. It wouldn’t be locked, but that was okay. By the time Damien realised she was gone, Adara would be miles away, and besides, there was nobody dangerous around that would endanger Damien because of an unlocked door.  
The dryad cast a last look at the small house, wishing that she had dared to steal a lantern, then Adara wrapped her cloak around herself and walked away, in the direction she had promised to avoid not hours earlier.  
The night was dark, and as she walked, Adara smelt the trace of smoke lingering from evening fires. There were some bigger houses around the area, like the one two doors down where the son had gone off to become a servant to a nearby Lord, and earned just enough to send his family a cut to keep them fed and watered. As she passed said house, Adara wished again that she had more time and more Control, because then she could easily take some of their bread and wine to keep her going on the road.  
It didn’t matter though, because she was severely lacking in time, and as she hurried along, she hoped that the customer’s information had been right. Really, most of her plan hinged on the knights’ greed, because if they had left the village earlier, then she wasn’t going to be able to follow them out in the morning.  
As the light from the pub grew brighter (the only place still open), Adara glimpsed well-groomed horses tied to the wall outside, and she relaxed a little in the knowledge that the knights must still be inside.   
She wondered for a moment whether to move closer and check, or whether to find someplace nearby to hide, but neither appeared practical. Instead, Adara hurried off to the main road from the village, walking a short way down it in the dark night. She startled once or twice at loud bird calls, as they were vastly different from the ones she had been used to, but it wasn’t long before she deemed that she had gone far enough to escape easy notice in the morning.  
She stepped off the rough-shod path, nipping into the trees that lined the edge between the woods and the road, and tucked herself in behind one quietly. It was a silver-birch, shiny barked and wide enough to conceal a small girl as long as she kept her head down and remained quiet.  
Adara pulled her cloak over her head, using it to camouflage her bright hair, and settled herself in to the little dip her body had made in the leaf debris and bracken. She would wake with the sun, as she always did, and follow the knights down their path. They were said to be accompanying a merchant carriage to the capital, so hopefully they would be going at a slow enough pace for her to keep up, and for her to eventually compel one of them into allowing her entrance to the main castle.  
I can work out the rest in the morning, Adara thought to herself, and closed her eyes against the pale slivers of moonlight.   
\------------------------------------------------

Adara’s initial plan had been simply to follow the soldiers to the city, find out where they were located, and work out a way to get past them into the main keep.  
Really, she didn’t necessarily need to follow the soldiers. She was a bit embarrassed to admit it, but the only real reason she had chosen the slightly riskier method of reaching Temes was because she wasn’t sure she knew how to get there on her own. Never mind all of the dangers she would face on route; no, following the soldiers had seemed like a great plan at the time.  
What she hadn’t counted on was what they might be doing on their way there.  
The little information she’d overheard at the pub and market, about the knights guiding a merchant, did seem to be correct, but it hadn’t been the whole truth of the matter either.   
Her journey had started off so easily, waking naturally at dawn, and ready to go long before the tell-tale clop of hooves clattered down the road. She had had no issue following from a short way behind, relishing in the opportunity to walk through nature again (she had missed the outdoors, in her past weeks attempting to finagle sword lessons from Damien) and not even concerned that her warm boots became sodden and grass-stained from the plants.   
When the road became more of a path through the woods and the small train was forced to slow, Adara had even had the opportunity to wander a little further away and so she had gathered a small collection of nuts and berries to eat. There had been the occasional mushroom too, but she knew that she took longer to identify them properly than she had, so Adara left the mushrooms where she’d found them. The nuts and berries had been welcome nourishment on her route, meaning she didn’t even have to break into her small store of rations for the entire first day of travelling.   
At night, it had been cold, but it wasn’t really any colder than it had been on her path from home (although she tried hard not to compare the two trips too often out of a longing for Keariris that sometimes surprised her in its intensity). The knights had had a fire to cook some meat that they’d apparently bought at the market, and a large part of her wanted to conjure up some Fire of her own, but caution had won out and Adara had reluctantly watched the fire from afar.   
She was even careful to hide when some of the knights went hunting on the second day, covering her tracks as her old teachers had taught her, and so she was rather confident by the time day three of her journey to the capital arrived.  
Of course, that was where it all went wrong.  
It had taken Adara a while to see that they had branched off at some point on their journey, and really it was only when the warm comfort of the woods began to thin that she realised they were close to another town.  
The town had been bigger than the one she had left; its sprawling buildings were contained by a large stone wall unlike the vulnerable edges of Cirrane, Damien’s village.  
She wondered if he missed her. She didn’t really think he would.  
Adara had been quite happy, admittedly, to be given the chance to steal a few more rations, and so she’d slipped into the bustling market at the first opportunity. She kept her head down and snuck the odd fruits and cereal into her faithful and battered bag, taking as much as she could, but her spoils had been interrupted by a loud clanging ringing out through the town.  
They sounded different to the ones in Cirrane, but Adara was fairly sure that what she was hearing was church bells.   
She wondered if it was nothing out of the ordinary, but the worried glances that people all around were giving one another concerned her, and Adara decided that it would be an apt time to leave.  
She began walking out, hood covering her bright hair again, but there had been knights at the edge of the crowd (some of the more boisterous of the dozen or so that had travelled here) and Adara was forced instead to follow the pack and head towards what appeared to be the centre of the town.   
It took her a good ten minutes of walking, and she eyed up a few of the alleyways along the way, but one boy slightly in front of her decided to make a break for it that way, and the knights had wasted no time in catching him and knocking him around the head a bit.  
She had no desire to draw attention to herself.  
By the time she entered the town square, packed to the brim with what looked like at least 300 people, Adara had no real plan to escape. She managed to stand at the edge of the crowd, but there was no way she could get away from the knights who kept a careful eye on them all- not with them on horseback and her not using her temperamental powers.  
After all, she didn’t really want to burn down the entirety of the village like-  
She shoved the thought away, and stared intently at the lead knight, the one who wore the blue plume and who had been giving the orders to all the others for the past few days.  
He was talking, but she didn’t care to listen. Instead, she eyed the odd box in his hand, concerned about what might be in it, and dimly noted that the merchant that they had been escorting was standing at the back of the square too. He seemed to be holding another of the boxes in his hand, and she presumed that there was more such items in his cart.  
The knight opened it, and even from the distance Adara was standing at, she felt a wave of magic rush over her skin, dancing along the edges of her hair and sweeping past her, and outwards. She shivered a little, and stared at the tiny gleaming crystal in the box in awe. How could such a small thing be so magical?  
Then, she registered where she was, and suddenly matched the situation to what little information Damien had given her about Marienne. Adara was horrified as she realised that the crystals must be some sort of magic sensing device, because in Cirrane they had taken all the people who bore magic.   
They had locked them in chains.  
They had taken them to fight their wars.  
Adara began to silently panic, knowing that her magic was likely far more powerful than anyone else in the square, and equally knowing that if they uncovered that she was a dryad, she would either be executed, banished or made to fight for the king. She could not tolerate any of it.  
As she worried silently, the crowd around her shifted, and she was startled out of her thoughts by its jostling. She snapped worried purple eyes to the knights that were beginning to shepherd people into lines, and realised that she only had two options.  
Run now, or fight her way out later.  
Later would probably have chains and a guard keeping watch on her. It would probably have around 10 others to distract the guards as opposed to the couple hundred that were distracting them now. They could restrain her magic (if they had the right equipment, but Adara thought that they likely did, considering the size of the cart they had accompanied and the comparatively tiny size of the crystals).  
But later could also be dark, where she could easily disappear, with the element of surprise, and less people to hurt if she lost control of her tentative magic.  
Adara had a split-second to make her choice.  
She decided to join the crowd.  
She put up with the worried terseness of the people around her, and impatiently waited in line for whatever magical test they were doing. Adara was a little worried, because if Marienne had been taken then surely it could sense even small amounts of magical potential and she was far more magically powerful than most humans.   
Humans, after all, mostly received their powers from trace amounts of magical creature blood. Adara was entirely magical.  
Regardless, it was an odd sensation, to both dread the end of the queue and wish for it, because she was a little bored, but equally terrified out of her mind. The rough line grew shorter and shorter, and suddenly Adara was being motioned forwards by the knight, who looked a little bored himself.  
He didn’t bother looking up, not at first, and she silently thanked the heavens because her purple eyes practically screamed non-human at anyone who cared to look. She bent over in her cloak a little more, just to be sure, and jumped when she was manhandled forwards by somebody from behind.  
It had been impossible to see what was going on from her place in the crowd, given that nearly everyone was a head or two taller than her, but Adara had occasionally felt the mild flicker of magic as the crystal brought magic potential to the surface. It hadn’t been anywhere near as overwhelming as the initial opening of the small box, but it had been present enough for her to notice.  
Really, she’d only seen what had happened to the person in front of her, which had been rather dull in all honesty. It was a tall man, probably at least thrice as old as her, who had trudged forwards and put his hand on the stone, which hadn’t reacted at all, and then he had been brushed with some kind of dark paint and pushed back into the crowd on the other side of the knights.  
She glanced up at the knight now, his eyes focused mostly on the crystal that she stood next to, and summoned up her courage to reach out with a hand that she refused to let tremble. This close, the crystal was beautiful. It was a cloudy white, with the occasional glimmer of light running through its centre, but as her hand got closer, Adara thought the reflective veins began to turn a burnt orange, darker than her hair but just as noticeable.  
She paused, her hand almost on the stone, and used what pitiful Control she had to pull her precious stores of Fire closer to her skin. The crystal seemed to call out to the Fire, and Adara felt the way her Fire wanted to jump out of her and to the crystal, but she was the daughter and heir of the dryad king Adreez. She would not be overcome.  
Bolstered by her convictions, Adara determinedly completed the distance between herself and the crystal, placing her hand on the crystal and securing her magic, successfully holding it back and refusing to let the crystal react. The knight looked at it, and nodded blankly.  
She smiled tightly, still not turning her face for him to see it under her hood, and moved to withdraw her hand, flooded by victory and-  
Her Control broke.  
“No,” she hissed under her breath instinctively, not caring if the knight heard her, because the crystal was suddenly sucking viciously at her Fire as it poured from her into it, making it glow softly, then brighter and brighter until it practically blinded her to look at.  
Her Fire rippled out of her skin, luckily not a visible orange, but the crystal ripped it from her until she was forced to her knees, somehow unable to move her hand away from it.   
It could have been minutes or hours before Adara’s hand was forced off of the crystal, and she looked up, panting heavily, to see the lead knight standing in front of her, plume a little ruffled.  
She noticed that in his hand, he held the crystal, which was now a fading orange as it leaked off the remnants of her power.  
“Well then,” he said, and although he wore a helmet, Adara realised with a growing sense of horror that he was definitely wearing a smirk. “It seems we have quite the powerful sorcerer on our hands,”   
Adara wondered whether they had managed to capture anyone with anything like her power level before. It seemed doubtful, considering that they were probably smart enough and capable enough to get out of the way and instead, here she was, unable to Control her own power and walking into dumb situations.  
She wondered what her father would say. She thought he’d probably be disappointed.  
She wondered what Damien would say. She thought there’d be a lot more sarcastic comments, but then again, if she’d listened to Damien then she wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.  
Adara breathed in deeply, regaining her breath, and looked up, looking the knight straight in the eyes with bared teeth.  
He stared right back, and without looking away, motioned for another knight to come near with what appeared to be a set of handcuffs. He bent down, and cuffed them around her hands, and she broke away from the stare to see the townspeople just standing around, not doing anything. Neither had any other magic users been apprehended like she had (not yet anyway, she amended in her mind).  
“Take her now,” the lead knight ordered the man holding her, and he grabbed her arm harshly and dragged her to her feet. She struggled like a feral cat, but her slight frame was unable to stop the man from bodily picking her up and carrying her away from the town square.   
Her magic hadn’t (yet) been inhibited, but Adara knew that the crystal had drained her too much to fight back magically anyway. Instead, she struggled with her captor physically, trying to reach around him and grab the dagger that she had taken to keeping in her boot, but she wasn’t quite able to reach it, since he had such a tight grip on her arm.  
Adara opened her mouth viciously instead and bit the man hard, trying to shock him enough to drop her. He cursed at her instead, and she bit down as hard as she could, trying her best not to gag as she realised his blood was beginning to enter her mouth, but the problem was quickly solved for her as he cuffed her hard around the head, first with his fist. When she kept struggling, albeit dislodged from her attempts to bite her way free, he stopped, dropping her to the ground, and drawing his sword.  
The hilt of the sword was brought down upon her head, and Adara’s world became dizzy and confused.  
Her last coherent thought was ‘I really need to stop being knocked out like this’, and then she slipped into unconsciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, no missing scenes?


	5. Chapter 5

Damien hadn’t been all that surprised to find Adara gone.  
True, he’d expected her to stay, but there was always something wild underlying the irises of her purple eyes that let him know that she wasn’t one to stay in a small village like his. He had almost allowed himself to hope that she would though, and he’d thought that refusing to teach her swordsmanship might lead to a realisation that maybe she didn’t have to do anything in search of revenge.  
He had thought she might say farewell though.   
When he had come down the next morning, early enough to travel to market and leave Adara to her now daily routine of the deliveries, Damien didn’t have a name for the emotion he felt, looking at her abandoned blanket and pillow. He thought Marienne might have called it sadness, or disappointment, but Damien wondered whether it was more resignation or relief.  
Whatever it was, it took him a few minutes of blankly staring at the blankets heaped on the floor to make a start on the day. He picked the items up almost mechanically, folding them neatly and taking them back to his own room, since winter was beginning to draw closer and it would be getting cold at night soon.  
He left then to buy some food, almost buying enough for two and then correcting his mistake and putting back half of the potatoes. It took him longer than it used to, because he’d found a new routine, and by the time he had finished deliveries and opened up shop, it was almost half an hour later than his usual opening time.  
Damien didn’t think anyone would notice, but there were a couple of people waiting around for him when he finally unbolted the shutters, and so he was hard-pushed to deal with everyone waiting. He thought he was working slowly than usual as well, because the orders he’d set aside to be done that day weren’t finished by the time he closed, and Damien was forced to stay open for an extra hour to complete his tasks.   
There had been a few questions over the day about Adara, who he hadn’t realised had made enough of an impact to bear questioning about, but then again, small villages made small news seem massive. He had had to tell a couple of people that Adara had gone back home, and that she had just been visiting, and the cloying sympathy they had given him with Marienne’s departure returned in full force.  
Really, he didn’t think it was too big a deal. He continued thinking that even as he noticed that his sword was still on the shelf, and that his ornamental dagger was gone. Damien was also adamant that there had been no silent curses at the fact that Adara had taken the more useless of the two objects, but he would admit to sparing a thought as to whether she would be sensible enough to at least hide the object somewhere less visible and avoid herself the trouble of highway robbery.  
He rather suspected she would attempt to stab first and ask questions later, but her short little dagger would only hold up under surprise attacks. Damien knew he was a good blacksmith, but he hadn’t been trained for weaponry and the dagger probably only held a few clashes against a blade in it before it shattered and left Adara defenceless.  
He wasn’t worried about her. Not at all.   
But when he fell asleep, he dreamed of her in chains.  
It was light outside, the sunlight slanted onto muddy cobblestone in a way it never did in Cirrane. The town before him was bigger too, a large wall carving a perimeter around the edge and two knights stood distantly by the only entrance into the town.  
Damien looked the other way down the street he found himself on, having ascertained that one way led outwards, and he saw that the other direction led inwards, straight on to a crowd of people.  
He walked towards it, noting with detachment the curious lack of bustling people in the rest of the town, and feeling an eerie sense of déjà vu as he looked up to see knights guarding the edges of the town square, and two knights standing in the centre with more Venirox. They weren’t the same as the ones who had tormented Cirrane; the lead knight had a blue plume and not a purple one, but Damien knew what they were doing all the same.  
He walked forwards, reaching out to tap the shoulder of the person in front, and passed straight through them. Damien changed his plan, and instead walked onwards, ignoring the crowd as if they weren’t there (because to him, they weren’t) and headed for the front of the line.   
The nagging feeling of something wrong continued. It tore at his chest, and as he came to a still by the front of the queue, he knew why.  
The figure at the front, bent under a dirty cloak, was familiar. She had familiar orange hair, and when she glanced up defiantly, the same fiery purple eyes.  
Adara.  
Damien wondered blankly what she was doing here, and stepped closer still, close enough that were he physical, he could reach out and touch her. He put out a hand to stop her moving.  
She moved straight through it.  
She looked nervous, in a way that Damien hadn’t seen before, and he thought for a moment that she had recognised the crystal too. The fact that she reached out her hand moments later showed that she hadn’t ever.  
“No,” he whispered to her, as she touched the crystal, and waited with baited breath as her outstretched hand didn’t cause it to light up.  
He wondered why, suddenly, he had been so certain that Adara had magic. Surely he would have seen some trace of it if she had, but it was clear that his odd intuition had been wrong.   
The Venirox didn’t light up.  
He glanced away, towards the lead knight, and his vision became wavy, hazing at the edges like the sky itself was melting, and Damien felt his skin prickle under the strong blast of-  
He had known what it was for a moment. Why now, could he suddenly not remember?  
Damien’s head felt a little fuzzy with the strange lack of tangibility that had settled on the world around him, but as he looked up, he locked eyes with a knight. He dismissed it for a moment, but then the knight dismounted, walking towards him purposefully and Damien didn’t move.  
The knight halted in front of him, deep green eyes still locked intently with Damien, and as Damien narrowed his eyes, he realised that the shade was similar to his own. Extremely similar.  
The knight reached up slowly and took off his helmet, allowing a small curtain of grey hair to fan out onto his shoulders. Damien startled a little at the sheer amount of it, and the man smiled a tight smile, before reaching out an armoured hand and placing it almost gently on his shoulder.  
“It’s been a long time,” the man said softly, and Damien frowned at the- longing? tinging his tone.  
He didn’t reply.  
“I wish-“ he began, and looked to be glancing behind Damien. Damien refused to be fooled, and analysed the knight instead, seeing the way his own features were traced into the knight’s face.   
“You must go to her,” the knight said instead, cutting off whatever he had intended to say, and staring intently into Damien’s eyes. “You must,”  
The strange burst of haziness began to move away from Damien suddenly, leaving his ears ringing and eyes blurring. He shook his head once, shaking off the odd sensation, and saw that the world was dark as night now.  
He wondered what the knight had been looking at behind him, and instinctively turned to see whatever it was. A torch was being held somewhere out of his vision; his world had narrowed down to two people.  
Himself.  
And Adara, who lay on the dirt floor behind him in chains.  
In the light of day, the dream seemed even less real than the night before. Damien had woken up with a hare-brained inclination to pack up all he owned and go, but it had only taken a moment of careful thought to realise the foolishness of such a plan.  
Damien had never been one to be foolish.  
So he had unpacked the clothes he had thrown into his satchel, bought food, done his deliveries and continued the day as usual. Customers drifted in and out like they always did, and Damien worked hard enough to make sure that he got to everyone in plenty of time, had a break for a substantial lunch, and closed at his usual business hours for a light dinner.  
It was as if Adara had never happened. It was also as if Marienne had never happened.  
Damien didn’t mean to cause Marienne any harm, and never had, but he knew that he had never been the best fiancé for her. She was a little romantic and a little flighty, and her idealised worlds just never quite clicked with his cynical grumpiness towards everyone and everything. She never really argued with anything he did, and although that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Damien knew himself well enough that he could admit that his was an imposing personality, and over time, he had been told that it could degrade others.  
The most emotion he had ever seen Marienne show towards him was when she was taken. Anger.  
He didn’t mean to dwell on his thoughts all day, but despite his best attempts at normality, there was a prickling sensation underlying everything he did that whispered the words from his dreams.   
It whispered you must go and it’s been so long and go and-  
Damien ignored it, like he often ignored the irrational parts of his brain. What logic was there in leaving, not even mentioning the part where he would be leaving to chase a girl he’d known three weeks on the off-chance that she was in trouble.  
She was old enough to know that her actions would always have consequences, and that leaving his home in the way she had would only cause her more grief on her journey to revenge.  
He was a blacksmith too, and that meant he couldn’t just pick up the tools of his trade and leave. He had worked hard to buy his home and forge, and a life of permanence always made more sense than one that was temporary.  
So he chose instead to continue drifting.  
It took four days before he changed his mind.  
Drifting had been the way that Damien had lived most of his life. He tended to qualify ‘life’ as after his arrival in Cirrane as a young man nearly a decade before, and it primarily involved following his logic and avoiding tough decisions. It was a method that served him well, even during his meeting and courtship of Marienne, and honestly Damien wasn’t sure how long he would have continued to do so if it wasn’t for the unexpected interruption of Lydia.  
“So where’s that girl of yours then?” she asked, leaning on the counter as was her wont, and Damien shrugged.  
“Gone home,” he said succinctly, even though no part of him believed that.  
“Has she now?” Lydia raised an eyebrow, looking surprised, and Damien uncharitably cursed her nosiness internally.  
“I presume, yes,” he responded, making note of the little money Lydia had placed down, and walking across the room to retrieve a few sets of crockery and cutlery.  
“I presume? You mean you don’t know?” Lydia asked, and Damien didn’t respond for a minute.  
“Woke up. She was gone,” he said tightly, placing the cutlery down and staring at her aggressively.  
“She could be anywhere then!” Lydia cried dramatically, and Damien tcched curtly.  
“She’s gone home,” Damien said again, despite knowing it was the opposite. He was hardly going to tell some gossiping old biddy that Adara was off to take her revenge on knights of the king. That would get her in trouble for sure.  
“Oh, you poor dear,” Lydia sighed, leaning down further and exposing her chest a little more. She ran a supposedly sympathetic finger down his arm, and he jerked away sharply. It didn’t deter her.  
“It must be lonely in this house of yours, with first Marienne and now that darling girl- Ada, was it? Both of them left you here, with no reason to stay but your work? Why-“  
“Fork?” Damien cut in, and she blinked, derailed.  
“Two cutlery sets, please,” Lydia affirmed, and continued. “You must come let me know if it gets lonely. It sure does at the bakery, with just me and my girl friend Beth….”  
“5 shillings,” Damien grunted, picking up the money from the counter himself and giving back the correct change, suddenly desperate for Lydia to leave. She couldn’t have known it, but her words echoed the thoughts that he had had immediately after that dream; where he had realised that he really did have very little to stay in Cirrane for.  
It wasn’t like he loved Cirrane. It wasn’t like he had many friends in it. It wasn’t like he had a family at all.  
Really, the only thing that kept him in Cirrane was his property, and Damien wondered when that had become so important to him.  
How had his job, once a thing of convenience, become the only part of his life he cared about? Damien wracked his brain, trying to work out just what had happened in the interim, and the realisation that he couldn’t remember most of the details of the last few years shocked him. It shocked him enough to immediately put up the shutters and lock up the forge, stumbling into the noticeably cooler kitchen and into the chair to think about what that meant.  
He looked around the room, seeing for the first time its bare walls and lack of belongings as a negative, and wondered if perhaps Adara really had been suffering all this time as he continued with everyday life.  
Yes, she had chosen to leave. He wasn’t responsible for her.  
But could he be responsible for not helping her survive?  
Damien sighed, placing his head in his hands, and began to plan.  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------  
The next day, Damien stopped taking orders for goods. More than one person had looked at him, flabbergasted, when he told them he was leaving town the day after, even though he hadn’t said anything about whether he was returning or not. He hadn’t worked that part out yet.  
Instead, he made sure to tell each customer that dropped by that he wasn’t going to be around for a little while, so they should buy whatever they needed within the next day or else they were going to have to travel or trade elsewhere for metalware.  
He was promptly overwhelmed with customers, and was forced to spend the two days largely selling most of his goods. He had raw metal and coal still in his shop, but Damien sold the coal at the market and packed up a collection of the metal to have as an emergency stock if he happened to be passing anywhere on his journey.   
Damien spent most of the first evening using up the bits he didn’t want to take by welding it into a couple of daggers, not as pretty as Adara’s, but hopefully functional and enough for protection. He made a sword as well, taking as much time as he could spare on it, and made sure not to decorate the hilt in any way. There was no use tempting trouble.  
The sword he made was longer than the one he had, heavier and stronger too, and so he packed it on his belt whilst he packed the first sword into his bag. The bag contained only a few outfits (the little clothing he owned fit inside it easily), some basic working tools like a hammer and a set of pliers, his weapons and a store of food that he had bought to eat along the way.  
The last thing Damien packed away in his bag was the little stone amulet that Adara had left him with. He wasn’t sure if it had been intended as a gift, or if she had simply left it behind, but it appeared to be made of some kind of blue semi-precious stone, and Damien thought he’d be a fool to leave it behind.  
He had been tempted to wear it, but ultimately decided against it. After all, he wasn’t sure what kind of enchantments had been placed on it, given that it looked of at least sentimental value, so into the smaller of his two bags it went.  
It all felt a lot like a dream. Even morning on the day he’d designated to leave town on had an air of surrealness, as he sat down to nibble on cereal as one last luxury before he left everything he knew.  
Damien wondered how much of his decision had been fuelled by Adara, and how much of it was his own choice. It felt a little like he’d always wanted to travel, but it was as if he was chained down to Cirrane, because there was a large part of him that seemed to want to unpack the bags by the door and hurry to work; to return to routine and stick with what he’d always known.  
Damien rinsed his bowl clean, and put it in the bag.  
It was too bad for the little voice in his head that tugged towards his workshop, because despite how extraordinarily odd it felt to be leaving everything behind, he had made up his mind. And Damien was nothing if not stubborn.  
He sat on his chair and laced up his shoes, ones that Rowan had touched up the soles of the night before (free of charge), and stood with his shoulders firmly pushed back, and not an ounce of regret in his body language.  
He did one last check to make sure that the workshop was firmly secured (he’d left his tools with Leon’s wife, Freya, with a promise of payment if he returned before the next autumn and his permission to sell the tools on if he didn’t). It didn’t take long to wedge the last of the window shutter bolts in place, and all too soon Damien was picking up his bags and carrying them outside.  
The last bolt was on the inside of the door, but instead Damien locked the door with a newly fashioned lock that he’d made the day after Adara left, as though to keep other thieves out or perhaps with a slight thought that he might need it for this exact purpose.  
To leave.  
Damien reached up and tucked the key atop the door frame, ready for Jeff (the pub owner) to pick up and keep safe. He’d promised the man that he would sell him the house the year after if he didn’t want to return, and that he could have it free of charge if Damien never returned.  
Everything was sorted. Damien had no more reason for procrastination.  
He hoisted his two bags up, placing one of them securely on his back and holding the lighter of the two in his hand. The bags weren’t especially heavy, although that might have been judging by Damien’s standards, as he was quite a strong, burly man, and he thought that it would be easy to carry along for the week-long walk to Temes.  
He didn’t know where Adara had gone in the meantime (nor could he fully shake off the dream in which he had seen her captured) but Damien knew the path to the capital. Everyone in the village knew it. There were many crossroads and diversions along the main route, but logic was logic and Temes was North-East of Cirrane so all he had to do was follow the well-travelled paths that wound in the right direction.  
It was just approaching sunrise as Damien stepped out onto the street, and the village was beginning to emerge with the light. It was just after dawn that Damien left the village altogether.  
And it was midday before Damien stopped for lunch.  
He wasn’t necessarily tired, although he had been walking for a good six hours, but Damien’s arms were beginning to ache a little from the weight of his bags. He’d passed some merchants a little way back, and they had nodded politely, but nothing more.  
He snacked instead on bread and an apple, used to more substantial lunch fare like stew or pie, but unwilling to try and bring cooked meals with him. He only stopped for about ten minutes before he stood up again; his instincts were telling him that he needed to hurry. This wasn’t helped by the growing regret curling in his stomach as logic attempted to dictate that he turn back.  
Damien wasn’t a man accustomed to ignoring the most logical solution, but instincts were what he treasured above all else, and so Damien kept moving, walking at almost his full speed for the rest of the day.  
He only stopped for the night when the road became too dark to see without a torch, because he didn’t really want to have to light one of his few candles, and neither did he want to fall and break a leg.  
Instead, Damien trudged off the road and a small way into the woods, placing his bags down with slight relief and quickly gathering a small fire. It would do well for warmth and to keep off potential predators, so he fed it until it was strong, and ate some more of his rations. He had enough for three days, but Damien rather thought he might try and hunt something the next day (if he didn’t find an inn) because it wouldn’t do to run out of food.  
He laid out his bedroll carelessly, slipping into his blankets next to the fire, and made sure to keep his sword handy in case of bandits or wolves in the night. He had been half tempted to sleep up the tree, but that he didn’t want to trust his weight and life to his rope, and that he enjoyed the heat of the fire.   
Said fire was out by the time he woke up the next morning. He’d fed it fuel when he woke up in the middle of the night, but clearly it hadn’t been quite enough. Damien calmly took note of it and packed up all his stuff.  
The voice from his dream was ringing around his head again, yelling go as though that wasn’t exactly what he was doing, so Damien headed out as soon as he could, rather than waiting and resting a little longer as he had initially intended to.  
________________________________________

________________________________________  
Damien placed his bags down on the bed, looking around the dingy room cursorily, and quickly putting a dagger into his belt, swapping it out with the sword. The sword would draw more notice to him, even in a city full of knights like Temes.  
He took out a few shillings from his money as well, not wanting to take it all with him, but rather concerned about leaving it lying around as well. He compromised by hunting around the room for a suitable crevice, and leaving the money and his other valuable things under a loose floorboard in the corner that he’d found. Damien quickly pulled the wardrobe over it, making it as safe as he thought it could be.  
He straightened.  
Then he left to find the palace of the king.  
In fairness, it wasn’t particularly hard to find nor spot. The palace wasn’t central to the city, but it had been built on the remains of the castle of the dryads (or so Damien had been told). It was therefore at the top of the slight hill that Temes appeared to be built on, and was virtually pressed against the outside perimeter wall. Its main entrance was through the city itself, so Damien walked through the bustling streets of Temes to reach it, trying his very best not to become distracted by the beauty of some of its buildings, nor the obvious magic that danced around the banners and lights and decorations. It was far more people than Damien could every recall seeing in his life, and the city itself just seemed welcoming.  
He had already become distracted once. Damien was determined now to find out if Adara had been brought in in chains or not, if only for his peace of mind.  
The castle was visible from far off, standing almost a storey above most of the buildings around it. Damien assumed it was made of superior stone and so could stand taller in safety, but as he neared, he saw that the walls were crumbling slowly, and his hand came away brown with the mud of hasty repairs.  
Damien frowned. Adara or not, there was something wrong here.  
He poked at the section of the castle’s walls that he had found the mud daub on, and saw to his concern that the bricks themselves appeared laced through with cracks and faults. He wasn’t a stone mason, but the basics of architecture couldn’t be that different, and Damien could see where the faults would shatter metal if he were attempting to mould them.  
From afar, the illusion had been perfect. Closer up, the illusion of grandeur began to fail, and Damien began walking along the wall, trailing his hand across its edge to see where other hasty jobs had been patched on.  
He was just nearing the front of the building again when he found himself surrounded.  
“Stop!” a man demanded from behind, and Damien felt the sharp point of a spear jab into his back.  
He raised an eyebrow.  
“The walls are falling apart,” he told the guards surrounding him, each of the five dressed in polished metal armour with the symbol of the king painted on their breast.   
“Is that a threat?” the guard asked, and the others secured their grip on their weapons tighter, and he sensed that they were preparing for a fight.  
“I’m no sorcerer. I’m just a worksman who can see shoddy work,” Damien replied, his tone not quite mild but nowhere near as aggressive as he would like it to be.  
“Well then worksman, what is your name?”   
Damien turned around slowly, eyes darting across the details of the men surrounding him until he landed on the lead guard, the one who was talking to him.  
“Rowan Baker,” Damien lied, his instincts screaming at him to hide his true identity. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t intending to break in or anything, and it wasn’t like they would have heard of him anyway.  
“Rowan, leave now. And don’t hang around here again,” the lead knight ordered, and Damien dipped his head in acquiesce. He turned to leave, then paused, as if a thought had just occurred to him.  
“I was just wondering actually, if perhaps you might have heard something about sorcerers being trained nearby,” he asked, tone flat and as disinterested as he felt he could make sound genuine.  
“No, we haven’t. And if we had, I shouldn’t tell you, anyway,” the guard bit out, poking him once more with the spear, and Damien backed off this time.

He frowned, looking down at the ground for one of the first times since he had entered Temes. Why had the guard lied?  
________________________________________  
It took Damien two days to return to the palace.  
The first day he had spent largely asleep, the punishing pace that he had set on his journey into Temes catching up with him, and it was late afternoon before Damien struggled out of bed and downstairs to order a late lunch (or early dinner).  
The innkeeper had been accommodating, although he still cast doubtful looks at Damien’s dirty cloak and wild. Damien had never been one to particularly care what he looked like, but it seemed foolish to deliberately provoke trouble and attract attention, so that evening he was careful to wash the cloak in the small tub that had been provided for him, and used a pair of scissors to roughly cut his hair into a more manageable length. Nobody had cared what his hair looked like in Cirrane when he had a set role, but out here he was an unknown. Unknowns were always more dangerous.  
The second day, Damien spent the morning walking around Temes, trying his best not to be side-tracked by its arching beauty, and had found a blacksmiths stall in one of the smaller markets. He had managed to sell the man about a half of his raw metals, making less for them then they were really worth, but giving him enough money to afford another cooked lunch. He was doing his best not to deplete his savings, not in the least because he had no idea what he was doing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Andddddd unfinished chapter, missing scenes-
> 
> -Arrival in Temes & description of city  
> -What he gets up to (haven't decided yet, help may be required)

**Author's Note:**

> So chapter 1 is missing the scene where Marienne gets taken, mostly cos I haven't been bothered yet
> 
> Be assured it's v traumatic


End file.
